Mothers must be encouraged to breast-feed their babies

Ida Indawati Khouw, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Breast-feeding is a "skill" given by nature but some new mothers fail to breast-feed their infants, making them lose an important part of their early days in life.

The advantages of breast-feeding in the early months of life are unquestionable. Research has shown how important it is for a baby to be breast-fed within its first four to six days of life.

A recent study conducted by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology found that breast-feeding babies for less than three months might affect their intelligence.

It is also common knowledge that a mother's milk is full of special nutrients, hormones and antibodies that are passed on to infants to help them to resist, among other things, infections, respiratory illness and diarrhea.

The facts, however, show that only a few mothers breast-feed their babies due to various reasons. A research involving 900 mothers in the Greater Jakarta area in 1995 showed that only five percent of respondents exclusively breast-fed their children for the first four months. Out of the respondents, 70.4 percent of them had never heard about exclusive breast-feeding.

"This poor result shows that campaigns through the mass media on the importance of breast-feeding have yet to produce results. I have been involved in such campaigns for the last 10 years but awareness is still low. There must be another way. We'll try it (to raise awareness) by training counselors," Utami Roesli, head of the Breast-feeding Improvement Organization of St. Carolus Hospital in Central Jakarta, said last Monday after the opening of the training program for breast-feeding counselors at the hospital.

About 30 alumnae of the hospital school for midwives took part in the five-day training, which was claimed to be the first ever held in the country. The training was based on breast-feeding modules released by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef). New guidelines, recommending exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months of an infant's life were also released.

"The main purpose of the training is to enable counselors to promote breast-feeding and to motivate mothers to give breast milk exclusively in the proper way. Mothers are also expected to be able to handle small problems like blisters and minor infections without having to go to the doctor," Utami said.

The motivation, she said, was necessary in the face of aggressive promotions to bottle-feed babies.

"Advertising has affected people's way of thinking, influencing people to believe that without the powdered milk that is promoted as containing all substances to enhance intelligence, their baby will be less smart," Utami said.

Moreover, she said, it was no longer a secret that many hospitals were involved in promoting bottle-feeding for the sake of financial gain.

Unicef representative to Indonesia, Rolf C. Carriere, pointed out that breast feeding contributed much to the global community.

Quoting findings presented in March to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, he said that out of 12 million children under the age of five who die each year, up to 1.5 million of them could be saved by increased breast-feeding.

The World Bank study also showed that the economic loss due to malnutrition is at US$80 billion per year. "It shows how irrational we are by not paying attention to children," Carriere said. "Now it is high time to change our irrationality by spending much more of the state budget on children."